In the past couple of years there was a news report about a person who was convicted of “child molestation,” even though the person was an adult–because she suffered from MPD and she was in a “child personality” during the sex act.
Did this really happen? If so, with all the revelations about MPD largely being a faddish “syndrome du jour,” did his conviction stand?
To start with, MPD is unbelievably rare. Only a handfull of cases have ever been verified. Like amnesia, the number of cases in popular fiction dwarfs the number of real life cases. BTW: schitzophrenia (sp?) is not MPD.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
What is MPD?
Multiple Personality Disorder.
I’ve never heard of the case mentioned in the OP, and I rather doubt it because laws describing “child molestation” have ages in them, not “state of mind.” You either are a child, according to the law, or you are not.
But for the info of anybody interested, there has been an ongoing discussion of MPD over on Great Debates: http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/000388.html
The things I have read about MPD all indicate that the core personality and all the sub-personalities, have the same ethical code. Thus the person IS responsible for any actions committed by any of the pesonalities.
Mark, I believe they meant the victim was the one with MPD.
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Makes no sense to me because plenty of adults act like children.
I’ve never heard of someone being convicted of child molesting for sex with an adult MPD case. It is illegal to have sex with someone who can’t (in the eyes of the law) make decisions for themselves, and this includes various categories of mental illness. I can’t imagine that it would be more illegal to have sex with someone with MPD than it would if the condition were Down’s Syndrome, schizophrenia, Alzheimers’, or what have you.
Thus I think there was probably a case of somebody who got in trouble for sex with an MPD, and an urban legend sprang up incorporating MPD per se into the conviction.